Governments are increasingly regulating the use of email for commercial purposes. For example, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) came into effect in Canada in July 2014. One objective of CASL is to protect Canadians from spam email, while allowing continued growth for business in the global market. The introduction of this legislation brought about a need for email filtering systems that facilitate a user's (or “sender's”) compliance with CASL.
One aspect of CASL that came into effect in July 2014 was that businesses and organizations cannot send commercial electronic messages if they do not have proper consent from the recipient to send the message. The form of consent may vary, but there must at least be implied consent from the recipient to receive a commercial electronic message.
The current penalties for violating the provisions of CASL include a possible financial penalty, per infraction, of $1,000,000 for individuals and $10,000,000 for businesses. As such, businesses and organizations are provided with a significant incentive to ensure their compliance with the new legislation.
Several known inventions have generally addressed the area of email filtering. However, such tools all have significant limitations.
For example, software has been developed that can be installed by a user that parses outgoing entails, determines whether the recipient of the message is on an unsubscribe list and, if so, removes the unsubscribed recipient from the email's recipient list prior to sending the email.
Many email management systems focus on the filtering of incoming emails. Such systems filter incoming email messages by using a whitelist that compares the email address of the sender of an incoming email message with a list of addresses on a user's pass list. By doing so, the system filters any email messages being received from addresses previously unknown to the user, such as spam.
Despite the many inventions known in the field of email management and email filtering, the known prior art fails to address certain requirements mandated by CASL for sending commercial messages.